Blogs I Read: Northeast

Blogs I Read: Cascadia

2014.10.19

In other cities, you gather on the beach for fireworks. In Darwin, you do it for lightning. But where’s the proscenium or safety rail, to say nothing of the insurance? Who separates spectator from show when the show is not just out there on the Timor Sea but also right over our heads?

Still, like bears at the zoo, this storm seems trained not to kill the spectators. It poured warm rain earlier in the evening, and now, through a brilliant sunset and into the night, is just doing the lightning part. The bolts are horizontal above us, vertical only when blasting the sea. Well-behaved lightning, but will a white metal railing do for a fourth wall, lawn this side, beach beyond? Will a row of tables do, like these at which I sit, with fish and chips mined for protein but otherwise abandoned beside me? Everyone else lined up at the tables here, grouped about white wine bottles in tabletop coolers, an Australia of confidence and leisure, seems to think so.

Thunderstorms give Darwin its drama and shape. Without them, it’s flatly hot and humid, or later, flatly hot and dry. People who love to be outside are out at night, when it's the slightest bit cooler and at least the sunburn risk is gone. I’ve never seen so many people in a city’s parks at 5 AM, or midnight.

The screaming trees are an evening thing. Around sundown, many hundreds of rainbow lorikeets gather in one massive tree downtown, their chatter so deafening that nobody tries to talk nearby. Thickly white-spattered pavement beneath confirms that this is the tree, the one where it happens every night. It’s a tropical thing; the same species in temperate climes is also social but never in such astonishing numbers. What can be more important than whatever has brought this vast assembly together?

Other wildlife? Black flying foxes are here, squirrels with wings, gliding and squeaking their way through crepuscular commutes, but not in the great volcanic masses such as once harried Sydney’s botanic gardens. There’s a white social parrot called the Little Corella, one of several Australian birds with a permanently disapproving expression. Spotted one stunning azure kingfisher flitting among mangroves.

And of course, there are crocodiles. One could emerge from the water, ocean or estuary, at any moment, especially for something bite-sized. (Stinging box jellyfish are another reason to stay completely out of saltwater during the wet season.) Aussies like their crocs zooed, caged, poked, and prodded from a safe distance. Most of the country’s microzoos have one, and here there are several big parks with plenty of attention to this largest of reptiles. There, you can watch them being fed, gaze into their porcelain jaws, hold their cute babies, feel spooked by their open-mouthed taxidermic stillness, and be lectured in shrill feminine monotones about not standing in the water while fishing.

“Look there, that’s the female, with just her eyes sticking out of the water, looking just like a bit of wood. She doesn’t even need to stick out that far to see what's going on above the water. You see, you have to watch out because crocodiles are intelligent. They will size up whether they’re big enough to eat you. They’ll go for your leg, but if you offer them something more bite-sized, like a child, they’ll go for that.”

We titter on cue. Crocs do nibble around the edges of Darwin, as cougars do around Los Angeles. There are periodic tabloid-fueled debates about somehow getting rid of them, but it’s pointless of course. These hot, buzzing mangroved estuaries – red mud, gray air, and greenish-black water -- are co-evolved with them. Everything selects reptilian patience over mammalian anxiety.

Darwin is a surprisingly highrise city, soaring hotels and apartment towers crowding the downtown peninsula, shoving each other to catch the views. It’s less clear where so many residents work, except that this is a natural resource town – mining, natural gas, etc – and that means vast corporations that can buy 100 units in Darwin just to have for whenever they’re needed. It was impossible to believe that everyone was at home: not nearly enough traffic or pedestrian life for that.

The towers have that sudden-colonist look, that just-landed-from-space look, as though they may have crushed something interesting when they fell but the debris has been tidied up. One short street, advertised in an old guidebook as a site of an interesting bar and restaurant, is nothing but sterile towers now. One is even called the Envy, as though Deadly Sinners only need apply.

People are nice but a bit distant, as is common in outposts of exiles, prospectors and tourists. As I talked with local planners about public transit everyone asked me if it was reasonable to ask people to walk to the bus in Darwin. My answer is the same as when I’m speaking in Edmonton in mid-winter: “it’s amazing what human beings adapt to, though they always complain first.” Here, though, I’m paused by the seas of white faces that are almost almost all exiles from the cooler southern cities. They’ve gone up here for a few years’ adventure maybe, proud of a certain resistance to full adaptation. The aboriginals are adapted, of course, as are all the recent immigrants from the similar climates of south and southeast Asia. But none were in the room in any meeting I attended, and even white people who had grown up here talked about the climate as though it were something alien, confronting, “character-building” to use the common Aussie term.

But when I went for a rain-run in the mangroves and scrub of Charles Darwin National Park, I was quite comfortable. Perhaps Darwinites should just spend the wet season in swimwear. It’s just a warm shower, washing off sweat as you go.

2011.03.05

For the last ten days, I've been happily settled at a friend's house in the country on the edge of Berrima, New South Wales, a tiny historic town a few hours drive southwest of Sydney. I've been working on a book project, mostly at a picnic table outside the small house where I'm staying.

It's been serene, except that, well, late February and early March are supposed to be summer. Aussies, oddly, reckon seasons as starting on the first of the month, so March 1 is the beginning of fall, but we're all on the same rolling ball, and the astronomical fact is that we're not at the equinox yet. So it bloody well ought to be summer, even if tendrils of red are starting to creep down certain exotic leaves. I didn't expect the blasting heat of an El Niño summer; this is a wet, grassyLa Niña year. But still ...

Still, on clear days and cloudy ones, there's been a chilly breeze from the south. South means Antarctic here, of course, so the concepts "south" and "cold" are intertwined and feed off one another, making a south wind feel a bit colder than it technically is. For all I know, this persistent breeze may originate in the paddock across the road, but because that paddock is south of me, it comes wrapped in the pale blue aura of the Antarctic. Brr.

So, needing a sign, I'll take it. For better or worse, I'm leaving Australia in a few weeks, to take a six-month assignment back in Vancouver, Canada, where I lived in 2005-6. So I'll take the cold south wind as a little push in that direction.

Leaving Australia for Canada will feel, I expect, much like leaving Canada for Australia. For months it felt like the right thing to do, leading to an crescendo of certainty as things fell into place. Then, for the last weeks, it felt profoundly wrong. In the final days before I left Vancouver in 2006, every douglas fir and salal bush seemed to be questioning my judgment, and perhaps muttering vaguely of betrayal.

Now, after years of poking about in Australian landscapes, I expect the same critique. Can I live without the twelve-tone contemplations of the Australian magpie, the confounding abundance of eucalypt species, the radioactive cuteness of the koala, or the consoling serenity of the kangaroo's patient gaze? Yes, I can, but this sadness has accompanied all of my life's departures, and it's like an old friend now.

2011.01.25

When you turn a camera on Angophora costata, they'll seem to be performing for you.

But I can't photograph how they really look to someone hiking the forests around Sydney. The curious color and what I can only call a vaguely animal presence, especially when seen in the very corner of your eye. They are the kind of tree that makes you feel the forest is watching you, maybe even making jokes about you behind your back.

Flesh-colored would be the easy term, though of course they weren't that until 1770 when people of that color arrived. But I'm of that color, so I'm ready to see human arms waving in the forest.

Saturation is a challenge. Did I exaggerate the color in the pic above, or understate it below? Who knows. Angophora is one those complex sense-impressions that never quite comes through in a photo.

I'm fond of this image of an Angophora flowing over a rock. You can sense the curious roughness of the bare surface, again fleshlike, and perhaps a bit feminine

Like the closely related Eucalyptus, Angophora often makes a big show of shedding bark. It surrounds itself with a deep mound of slowly-decaying matter, as though preparing its own pyre. The shedding happens mostly right at the base, leaving the distinctive bare trunk.

Often the mound of droppings is easier to look at than the tree.

So I frequently find myself dealing with an Aussie tree by studying the litter below it. Sometimes this happens becuase the tree is huge and its foliage is lost in the canopy. With Angophora, well, the rich textures of the droppings suggest that they, as much as the towering form, can tell me what this thing really is.

Wherever nobody has mowed, the grass around Canberra is a meter high. The kangaroos and rabbits can't multiply fast enough to eat it. I wonder if farmers on gray days are having trouble counting their sheep.

I came to Canberra expecting a hot, quiet summer of writing. I imagined myself in the shade, writing at a picnic table, bottles of cold water in the esky at my side. Instead, it's been unstable weather, often overcast and even chilly. One midsummer day had everyone digging out their scarves and mittens.

Australia is like this, all gestures of excess. In inland North America, they're used to the blasting difference of summer and winter, but in Australia the difference between years is as great as that between seasons. Aussies speak hopefully of seasonal cycles, and indeed, winter is usually colder than summer, but there are no guarantees, and the less predictable cycles of the El Niño Oscillation can sweep everything to one side or the other.

2010.09.03

I happened to be in Australia's small capital city, Canberra, on September 1, which for odd reasons lodged deep in the Aussie psyche is considered the official first day of spring. Every time I turned on the local ABC radio station (the Aussie equivalent of NPR in America or the BBC in Britain, and commonly known as "Auntie") somebody was talking about what was happening in their gardens. The night before had been the first frostless night in weeks, and the plants were swinging into action.

Auntie's reliable voices covered the news with the same calm but intense focus that they bring to everything, announcing the blooming of theHardenbergiain exactly the tones they'd use to describe the latest movements of the Taliban or the breaking news of the Labor Party's deal with the Greens. And indeed, these masses of tiny purple pea-flowers were exploding everywhere.

2010.04.04

Any moment can be the junction, the invitation to turn.The other night, in a taxi from some Australian airport to some nearby hotel, I listened to a man on the radio interview a woman who was an
expert on cleaning.For twenty
minutes they discussed all the ways that one substance can
befoul another.Many of her solutions
involved methylated spirits, glycerine, and assorted alcohols and hydrocarbons,
but all applied in a low-tech way, a bit of this on a sponge, a bit of that on a cloth wrapped around a fork.Water
seeping in around the base of your floors can be arrested by a row of chalk,
which, when it’s absorbed the water, can be set out in the sun to dry.Red mulberry stains can be cleaned by
applying green mulberries.Over and
over, she gave us the formula for all our fantasies of erasure, parables of
the undoing of sad accidents, ending with everything back as it
was.

I tuned it out initially, wished I could turn the radio to
strong male voices explaining how Australia was weathering the financial
crisis, but then at some moment I had a rush of love for this woman on the
radio, this priestess of erasure who knew how to undo all life’s calamities --
but of course, this being Australia, a priestess without mysteries, no hokum or humbug as Aussies would call it, just a
small cabinet of solvents, essential oils, and chalk.It’s science, and only my credulity makes it
seem like magic.She was that classic
practical Aussie woman, in control, getting it done, pushing back death with
her solvents and mop.I loved that she
exists, and in that moment could have listened for days.

2010.01.22

My computer screen has a little widget that shows me Sydney's current weather, and the forecast highs and lows for the day. Right now it says: "Sydney: now 41 degrees, high 25, low 23."

(In the US that would be "Sydney, now 106 degrees, high 77, low 73.")

This happens often, current temperatures way above the high, or sometimes below the low. Everyone notices wrong weather forecasts, but they're especially common in Australia. With no mountains to speak of, Sydney's weather can come from any direction. Dry from the west, wet from the east, cold from the south or hot from the north -- each of these ancient winds can reign with overwhelming force, yet flip on the slightest of butterfly effects.

After one recent wildfire, a witness interviewed on the local news sounded betrayed: "The wind kept changing direction!" she said. "It'd be going this way, and suddenly it would be going that way!" I wondered when God had promised her a constant wind. It reminded me of what a daredevil San Francisco bicycle messenger said to me long ago: "If pedestrians would just maintain a constant speed and direction, we'd never hit them!"

Predictions aren't just about the future. They structure the present with crucial illusions of confidence. Who cares if it's 41 degrees? I should go for a run. After all, they're predicting a high of 25. Once we're past this spot of bother, it should be a nice day.

2009.07.01

Last time I was in Melbourne, my hotel room looked out on a sea of churning metallic waves. Forty years ago they would have been called psychedelic.

Melbourne's old downtown was behind me, so those towers in the distance are the new Docklands district, not unlike the Docklands in London, a huge redevelopment area that's packing more people in around the edges of downtown.

Those waves in the foreground are the roof of Southern Cross Station. It's one of five stations on Melbourne's City Loop, the hub of the city's extensive electrified urban rail network. It's also the Melbourne terminal for the remarkably extensive V-Line system, a network of intercity trains linking Melbourne to the smaller cities all over the surrounding State of Victoria. I usually arrive here on a bus from the airport, which comes into an adjacent bus terminal. Southern Cross thus serves as part of the arrival experience at all scales, from daily commutes to flights from overseas.

Designed by Grimshaw Architects, and completed in 2006, Southern Cross Station was created out of the old Spencer Street Station by replacing the building but not the tracks. Remarkably, the station kept functioning, more or less, throughout the construction.

The new station is all about the roof. The vast undulating structure has a pattern of transparent stripes running the same direction as the tracks, as though gesturing energetically toward your direction of travel. It can capture the energy of arrival, too, as the waves can easily suggest something in the early stages of crumpling on impact. It's an effect that you might call muscular whimsy -- a fundamentally lighthearted idea rendered with overwhelming force. Such contradictions are often the key to creating a building of lasting interest in this deconstructed age.

The roof floats above the huge space without enclosing it; the station is open to the adjacent streets so that it feels even more outdoors than a classic rail station would, and provides a feeling of continuity with the busy streets on two sides. Some station functions are in freestanding structures under the roof but not connected to it, such as this large orange box that house two levels of station offices.

The integration with surrounding urban fabric is impressive. A major sports venue is a short walk away on a pedestrian bridge, which leads on into the highrise Docklands area. Trams (streetcars) stop on two sides. The major bus terminal is adjacent, with a large factory outlet shopping centre on top -- the sort of discount shopping that Americans can only get to by car.

The most striking effect of the station, for me, is that it's extremely hard to loiter in, and nobody does. V-Line trains wait at the platforms to depart, so passengers generally wait on the train rather than the platform. The platforms deliver the arriving passenger onto a huge featureless expanse of black floor, where the flowing roof seems to help hurry you along. Stopping to take photos in these spaces, I felt I was pushing back against the energy of the building.

Fortunately, the vast floor leads you out into thick urban fabric on all sides. The effect is opposite that of the grand cathedral-like space of a classic 19th century rail station, which seems to celebrate the rituals of travel such as greeting and parting. Southern Cross would not be a good place to jump and down waving your handkerchief as your lover's train rolls in, or out; if you did that, the roof would seem to be laughing at you. But it's a great place to move through quickly, a postmodern solo traveler with a small rolling suitcase, ready to greet Melbourne, or the world.

2009.04.17

When I first imagined moving to Australia, it was about space. Everything felt spacious here. The bracing void of the continent seemed to promise more room in all dimensions, not just between cities but between moments, between thoughts, even between walls.

But metaphors have half-lives, and as they decay the raw becomes rawer. On my first flight across the continent, I set myself a task. I would fix my eye on the patch of red land below me, framed like a picture in the airplane window. I'd take this picture as an object of meditation, follow my breath, and commit to remaining with it until something about it changed.

I could never do it. Perhaps the picture in the window would be scalloped pink dunes, stretching across the picture frame, rolling slowly to the left with always a new identical dune rolling in from the right. I'd watch as hundreds passed, waiting for the variation. Something. I didn't need a road, a town. A tree would have done, or even just a shift in the pattern of dunes, a spare beat in the rhythm. Nothing. The land did change, but at a pace below human perception.

2009.04.09

I took this photo in the Northern Territory, in Litchfield National Park just south of Darwin, but it's a good image of the Australian woodland as archetype. An Aussie friend saw it and said at once: "Yes, that's our national landscape. And that's our path." Maybe it goes somewhere interesting, but chances are it will lead to more of the same. At once we were spinning out the Australian national character: Don't get excited about the future; it's likely to be disappointing. Best keep your nose down. It'll probably just go on and on like this.

If you head out of any mainland capital and go for a walk in the woods, then except for the rare patch of rainforest it's likely to have this feel: A pervasive grey-green or "khaki" color. Trees of various sizes, at various densities, but mostly eucalypts, and mostly not very tall. Shrubs and grasses, now and then an herb. A heavy duff of dead leaves, slow to decay, smothering many sprouts.

The soil seems color-coded by region in a way that only underscores the sameness. In the north (pic above) there's often a burgundy tinge to the soil. In the southeast, around Sydney and Canberra, the path is usually orange:

... and in the west, I'm told, it's often a sandy beige. Sometimes the path leads somewhere amazing: a rock formation, a rainforest, an unusual flower or bird, but these things are striking in a distinctively Australian way, because of the reliable background on which they appear.

Even incongruity becomes reliable. Callitris, for example, is a conifer from the cypress family (juniper, redcedar, sequoia etc.) that somehow ended up in Australia. Conifers are so unimportant in Australian flora that I always think of Callitris as somehow exiled or astray. I've seen it in many dry woodlands in Australia, and in its thick dark green mass it always looks an exotic from the American west or Japan.

There's nothing like deep green to make you notice how grayed-out the background is.

There were many pleasures in my quick trip to the tropical north, but the strongest impression was of this remarkable constancy. Plants I met in the north were mostly different species of genera that I know from Sydney. It was a different team but with the same specialised roles, playing the same game.